Bristol Waste Company is keen to engage directly with households about the benefits of waste and litter minimisation and recycling. Real World Visuals has created two films that show the actual volumes of litter, recycling and recycling opportunities. The goal of the project is to elicit a measurable increase in waste minimisation and recycling and provide direct cost benefits to the council.

This film shows the volume of litter collected from Bristol's street every day - 10 tonnes, and every year - 350,000 tonnes.

This film shows the volume of material recycled by households every week and annually. The film also shows the amount of material that is NOT recycled. - the wasted recycling opportunity for helping the environment and saving costs for the council.

The films have been invaluable in helping establish the Bristol Waste brand and our company objectives. The visuals have allowed us to present a complex dataset to a wide audience in an intelligible, striking and immediately engaging way.

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— Eric WInbolt, Digital, Bristol Waste

This is the amount of material that households in recycle every week. Dotted lines show the amount that COULD be recycled.

This is the amount of material that households in recycle every year. Shadow area shows the amount that COULD be recycled.

This is the annual and daily amount of litter that Bristol Waste collects from the streets.

We started the project with a data analysis and scoping process to determine different visual options, bearing in mind the launch of the initiative at the International Balloon Fiesta in August 2016 where Bristol Waste sponsors the Solar Balloon.

Because the event took place at the Ashton Court estate on the edge of Bristol, we decided to commission drone aerial photography of the estate as the background scene, rather than using a computer generated background.

Bristol Waste Company is the city’s local recycling, waste collection and street cleansing company. The company employs 450 people who make 17 million scheduled collections every year, operate 180 vehicles, collect 140,000 tonnes of waste and recycling per annum of which 53,000 tonnes is sent for composting or recycling. BWC cleans 800 miles of streets and footpaths and deals with 180,000 ad hoc job requests and service queries annually.